End-to-End Experience Design

Making advertising, onboarding, distribution, engagement, and retention part of UX.

Article No :692 | June 22, 2011 | by Theresa Neil

When I started as an application designer in 2001, I worked really hard for my clients, whipping their applications into shape. I would conduct usability reviews and hands-on design sessions to overhaul the app, I’d agonize over each screen layout, review, test, revise, then buckle down with development until we pushed out the release. It was hard work and I was proud that I was a good designer.

But I had tunnel vision. Now I can see that the product interface is only one part of the customer’s end-to-end experience. I suppose that's why we have moved away from just user interface design and into user experience design. UX means more than just the product interface; it encompasses the whole experience a person will have with a brand and their overall satisfaction with a product.

Over the past ten years of in this field, I've evolved a solid UX design process that starts with discovery and ends with development integration, relying heavily on stories and prototypes in between. Many agencies and designers have evolved similar processes and share them on blogs and at conferences. Lists of UX deliverables such as wireframes, flow maps, and diagrams are frequently the topic of articles and talks, as well. But what I haven’t seen is a discreet checklist for what an end-to-end experience should include.

So I developed a checklist for the four phases of a customer’s experience:

This checklist can help product managers see the big picture for staffing, scheduling, and budgeting a project appropriately. UX designers should review this list with cross-team leaders to determine which dimensions they will need to provide design for, e.g., will the marketing department create the ads or will the design team?

Let’s look at how some successful products handle these important customer touchpoints.

Advertising & Promotion

What’s the first experience a prospective customer will have with your product? An online ad, a link in a long list of search results, your public facing website, or your blog are the most likely touchpoints. Each of these offers a unique opportunity to set expectations about the value and quality of your product.

Ads / Press

Products such as FuzeMeeting and Hipmunk use ads to drive traffic to their sites. Although FuzeMeeting is subscription based, and Hipmunk relies on ad revenue, they can both benefit from more visitors. Each of these ads displays the product name and a descriptive tagline:

Search Results

Ancestry.com and Basecamp are good examples of well-designed search results and effective search engine optimization. Search for genealogy and on the first page of results you’ll find out that Ancestry.com is the “world’s largest online family history resource,” and farther down you’ll see another link and persuasive description:

Or search for project management and you’ll find Basecamp on page one:

Compare this concise description with that of Axure. Axure used to be one of the top UX design tools, but you would never guess that from their product description on the fourth page of search results for wireframes:

Site with Tour

Your product’s site will shoulder a lot of responsibility, and is probably one of the hardest things to design. It needs to inform, persuade, engage, and ultimately convert visitors to customers. Mint and Digital Tutors use tours to engage visitors early and showcase the power of their products. Tours are usually a combination of product screenshots, informative copy, and videos:

Along with a product tour, Tom’s Planner and Picnik also offer visitors the option to try out the product with demo data before registering:

Blog

KISSMetrics and Mint both offer topic specific blogs that attract prospective customers and channel them to registration:

Onboarding

Joshua Porter has a great talk on Designing for Sign-Up in which he explains the problem of signup is not to get people to fill out a form, but to change people’s mind about your software.

If your advertising and promotion are effective, people will be motivated to try your product, which brings us to onboarding.

Trial

Harvest, like many software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, offers a free trial. They don’t even require a credit card, making it super low risk for a motivated user to become a trial user:

Early Registration

Sign up should be fast and simple. Basecamp requires a few fields of information plus a credit card to get started, but they promise you won’t be billed if you cancel in the first 30 days. Tumblr is even faster; just enter your email, password, and the URL you want, and you can immediately start posting to your new blog:

Quick Start

Quick start tips, also called “tour invitations” or the “blank slate stage,” keep up the momentum by immediately getting the customer using your product. PivotLabs and Yahoo! Calendar use this technique to quickly acclimate the customer to the product’s features:

Distributed Experiences

The UX agency Punchcut coined the term distributed experiences to describe the approach to designing multi-dimensional experiences for the new ecosystem we find ourselves in. They point out that “users are no longer fixed to high-computing desktops—they are surrounded by digital ecosystems and information networks wherever they go.” A web interface may satisfy many of your customers needs, but there is likely a growing demand for a mobile solution as well.

Web Interface

With the arrival of rich Internet applications (RIAs) in 2004-05, people’s expectations for the web changed. Instead of websites, there are now hundreds of thousands of web apps with highly interactive features like drag-and-drop, live preview, live save, and live scroll, to name a few. Balsamiq and Picnik are two of the 50 Most Usable RIAs; they are functional and beautiful, easy to learn, and easy to grow with.

Mobile Interface

A mobile version of your product can be a significant factor in customer satisfaction. Basecamp and Tom’s Planner both provide mobile-optimized web solutions, so customers with most types of smartphones can access their accounts.

An alternative to a mobile version of your web application is a mobile app, available to your customers for download and installation. Harvest and A Story Before Bed offer a subset of their functionality on the iPhone. Groupon provides the same functionally as their web product. Yelp actually provides more functionality than their web product with an augmented reality feature.

Engagement & Retention

Now it is time to close the deal. Market research can help determine the best pricing plans to offer customers. But conversion isn’t the only metric to design for; retention is possibly even more important.

The perceived value of the product will be measured against the cost each month (or other payment interval), so it is important to continue to communicate with your customers and provide a channel for their feedback.

Conversion / Upsell

Wufoo offers a monthly subscription model, like many SaaS products. The pricing is based on usage. Conversion to a paying plan after the trial period is encouraged. Basecamp uses the same approach, but they periodically offer discount codes for existing users to either upgrade at a reduced rate or try out other apps in their product suite, such as Highrise or Campfire.

Viral Elements

LinkedIn relies on people’s ever-changing connections in their professional networks to attract new users and retain existing customers. Other products such as YardSellr rely on existing social networks such as Facebook to gain exposure.

Follow-Up

There is a specific window for (re)engaging customers. Mint will tell you “your money misses you” if it has been more than two weeks since you logged in. A Story Before Bed keeps their product in the forefront of customers’ minds with special offers and new feature updates.

In addition to emails, an active blog and community forum can increase customer loyalty and your net promoter score. Balsamiq Mockups and Basecamp both have product blogs that encourage customer involvement:

Your Product's Score

Take a moment and see how your product scores. Does it rate a perfect 12 or are there some gaps in the end-to-end experience?

The term end-to-end is very fashionable right around in countries like Turkey which has a potential in the mobile innovation wave. But the term is being used in a highly wrong meaning. That is, if you have a mobile app or tablet version of your web-site, you have an end-to-end designed service, even the specs or features are not translated into different devices based on the real needs of the user.

I think, the explanations and the supporting sample cases are highly illuminating the case and helps us define the high-level topics of the issue.

I guess this list will work for a larger scope of a project. Because assets are more related to the marketability of the product rather than the internal functioning.
So my question is, how to equip a team in order to see the project form this scope. Our UX designers are analyzing the service in a very different perspective and our 'checklist' is far more different than above. Is it a task for the SDL? or must be seen in the interaction design process?

Hmmm. Only a percentage of all interactions to be designed are customer facing (e.g. starting with an ad). Your model is not generic enough for the label you've assigned to it.

I do however appreciate the need to reach beyond what is typically experienced: The Total Experience.

While this model doesn't do that, it is the most comprehensive of the typical skills/deliverables that I've seen. [Though I might add/change several, myself] http://project.cmd.hro.nl/cmi/hci/toolkit/index2.php

[it might be helpful for reading your post if you were to remove the spam comments]

Great article - Thank you.
On the topic of follow-up and retention, one thing that does keep me with a product even if I have issues (as all products do at one point or another) is fast and personal responses. A great example is Harvest time tracking. Their offering is not perfect and at times has frustrated me, but they have an active forum and blog as well as conscientious support people. I have been very impressed on numerous occasions when they:

1 - Always respond within a couple hours to a support request and then stay with me on an easy to reply to email thread all day until I am satisfied

2 - Explain the technical reasons or limitations behind perceived lack of functionality or bugs. This is a big one especially for a SaaS offering to a technical community, transparency is a big plus in my opinion.

3- Frequent and personal communication around improvements. I was especially impressed recently when Harvest sent out specific emails to myself and others who had commented on a feature request thread when they rolled out a related feature to make sure we were the first to know they had heard us.

4 - Ongoing dialog. Again, their team members take the time to comment (knowledgeably even) on the comment threads on their blog, letting their users feel like they are part of a discussion.

Maybe this checklist can help designers and entrepreneurs who may not have the benefit of marketing experience or a marketing department. It certainly helps me in contract discussions with potential clients.